Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis



The maritime tragedy off the coast of Italy continues to haunt me, and I am not alone. All of us who take occasional adventure cruises near icebergs, whales and strange parts share the concern about risk taking.

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Risk taking is a natural for any New Yorker who leaves the safe haven at home to venture abroad. Simple walk along a sidewalk has the risks of cracks, careless fellow walkers and bikers. Crossings present a further escalation, in deciding whether to wait for the lights, and how long. Next level in personal risk is biking and driving, amplified by endangering others; we remember the suicidal bike messengers on our streets up to the 1980s, when technology took over document transmission. One reminder is the broken bicycle frame painted white and locked to a lamppost on west side of 3rd Avenue and 17th Street, to remind us of a bicyclist crushed to death by a truck.

Next comes the risk of harming fellow travelers who have entrusted their wellbeing to your care. We must overcome our inner Fangio that overwhelms male drivers now and then, and accounts for traffic deaths and speeding tickets. Then we come to professional risk takers, viewed in ascending order: cab drivers, bus and train professionals, some licensed, and finally,at the top of the line, airplane and ship captains. Their vehicles permit , even command, the use of point-to-point automatic steering, to help overcome the risks of long exposure, fatigue and distractions. Airplane pilots are protected from public contact, while ship captains are expected to mingle and explain. This accounts for Captain Francesco Schettino, 52 (a dangerous age) now and then showing off his skills in steering the huge Costa Concordia Mediterranean cruise ship close to the rocks of a volcanic island, Giglio, rather than staying in the secure 200 foot deep channel in the middle of the 11-mile narrows between the island and Porto Santo Stefano in the safe Tyrrhenian Sea, a terrible showing of high risk middle-age male bravery, like walking in a hail of bullets, forgetting about exposing 4,200 passengers and crew, a $400 million vehicle, and 500K petrol gallons of spillage, a human as well as natural disaster.

It makes me shiver, because we know that coast well, having spelt several weeks over a period of four years, in the 1960s and '70s on Giglio, a non-touristy natural paradise in the seven island Tuscan Archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea, thought to be named for the Medici family’s symbol of lilies, but more likely owing its ancient Latin-transliterated Greek name to the goats who roamed the conical volcanic pine forested mountain. It had many rulers, was known as an Etruscan and Roman stronghold (mentioned in Julius Caesar's De Bello Civili and other histories), taken over by the Medicis in the 1200s, and used as a fortress against incursions by Saracen pirates, well into 1700s.

We knew of it from the tales of an adventurous Reader's Digest bookman, son of farmers in Kenya, whose family visited Giglio during the murderously hot African summers. In those days we were adventurous, travelling with suitcases that we could carry from plane to train, bus or car, and so, after arrival in Rome's Leonardo da Vinci airport, we easily shifted to a CIT bus to Porto Santo Stefano, an oceanside resort with a promenade reminiscent of a Raoul Dufy painting, halfway to Florence, expecting to catch a traghetto (ferry) to Giglio Porto. The island then had two hotels (later, also a camping site for Montedison workers’ vacations), and we were hoping to get a room at Le Palme, the cheapest (no real bathrooms, you stood on stones), or the other (name is lost but it had some facilities). Reservations? we were not sure that Le Palme even had phones.

After an hour's ocean ride in the wave skimming boat with donkeys, bicycles and a single car, we reached Giglio Porto, a tiny but busy commercial port , and a taxi took us to the sea side village, Campeche. Le Palme welcomed us, though no one spoke English, but there were a half-dozen pleasant tourists, and the family of an AlItalia pilot and his German wife took us under their wing. Soon we had a simple room , a meal and a bottle of local wine, shelved after use and marked with our name.

The beach was gorgeous, decorated with a small 1700s military fort, called the Medici Tower,the base for water board experts. One, a former Italian underwater swimming champion, went out every morning to spear fish for our table, then spent the afternoon drinking wine and receiving accolades. In the evening we all gathered in a local hall, for snacks and glasses of local grappa and conversation (our broken Italian was cherished), while the children gathered around two tall pinball machines, watching the tricky path of the balls gathering points, and cheering the competing local champions.

Our beach days included climbing to Giglio Castello, 500 meters above sea level, a tiny primitive poor town of wives and children of seamen, retired sailors and surviving widows, some living in mountain caves transformed into rooms and apartments millenniums ago. They produce olives, figs and some local wine, the basics of Italian agriculture. The Castello’s church is supposed to have a treasure, an ivory statuette by Giambologna, the Tuscan sculptor.



The town was poor, and you could buy a home for $500, until the hippies discovered the Castello. The whole island has only 1,500 permanent inhabitants, and is 23 km square (10 miles), the 23 mile coast is rocky, except for some sandy coves of which that of Campeche village is the biggest and best, popular with water board enthusiasts. The water was crystal clear until in 1973, the Mediterranean spit up lots of tar and pitch, the waves leaving a black line and we and the AlItalia family (our friendship has lasted through the years) ceased to visit Giglio. Magari, it was fun.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis





National Republican leadership, e.g. ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Gov Nikki Haley (R-SC) and the US Chamber of Commerce, as well as some of the powerful talk show hosts are finally waking up to the devastation of the GOP that the mutually destructive Presidential candidates are wreaking, and are gently begging to cease and desist, allowing Mitt Romney to proceed to the lead. It is a bit late, with SC primaries on January 21 and Florida on January 31.



Bur the social conservatives, ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Gov Rick Perry (R-TX) and ex-Gov, Sarah Palin (R-AL) are on a roll, well, maybe not Perry who just lost a top donor Barry Wynn for calling Mitt a vulture capitalist or some such. However, Gingrich has been refueled by a $5 million donation from Nevada gambling power Sheldon Adelson (hello, Supreme Court, is this what you meant in the Citizens United decision, allowing a corporate steamroller vote to overwhelm citizens' franchise guaranteed by the US Constitution?), all to be spent in videos, speech and TV commercials denouncing Romney as a Massachusetts moderate and a position changer, with the objective of trouncing Mitt in the primaries, while Newt rises and saves the Republican party.



Gingrich as a conservative savior came forth when Newsmax (the print and internet news service for Conservatives, founded by Christopher F. Ruddy in 1998 with financing from Richard Mellon Scaife the Clinton hater and similar backers) set up a half-hour laudatory pro-Gingrich program on major TV.



Newsmax has also been active in denouncing Rep. Ron Paul (R-TH), by highlighting some of the really ugly racist statements in his periodicals published by RP&A (Ron Paul's Investment Newsletter, Survival newsletter), e.g. nasty descriptions of Martin Luther King as a person and of his memorial day, rumors of deliberate infections of white women with AIDS and the like, which Paul claims were written without his knowledge. Although the newsletters brought him literally millions of dollars, the claims may have a basis; Dr. Paul has been busy building a post-twoparty system organization. One must understand Dr. Paul’s career – 1963-68 a flight surgeon in the US Air Force, then a pediatrician near Galveston TX, performing many free deliveries for poor people, concurrently reading Ayn Rand and economics of the Austrian School that blame the Weimar Republic’s collapse and WWII on runaway Socialism , selectively citing Frederick Hajek, but ignoring Arthur Pigou’ s warnings about negative externalities. The bellowed pediatrician was elected to the Congress in 1976 a served in several periods, 1976-85 and 1997 to now, taking time to run for US presidency as a Libertarian in 1988 and Republican in 2008. In Congress he busily wrote 464 items of legislation, to abolish income tax, the Federal Reserve, reinstate the gold standard and to immediately withdraw from wars and stop giving money support to foreign countries including Israel. Only one law passed a land grant for a park.



A mid-Manhattan person really has trouble understanding the mentality of the mostly western and midwestern voters who have readily embraced the Tea Party and have sent some 86 representatives to the Congress, with strict commands to break through the democratic system of checks and balances, ignore the realities of international economics and get millions of government employees fired, in the name of a balanced budget.

It is not only the TP people who embrace Dr. Paul, it is also the young crowd who four years earlier loved President- to- be Obama, now in disfavor because the inherited world situation did not permit him to keep many of his promises. Now they like Dr. Paul who is totally revolutionary and offers anarchism, forgetting that government is the key to the social compact that brought the Neanderthals out of wilderness and into a society. One can read his plans in Restore America Now, his campaign website, offering to rebalance the $14Trillion budget in three years, starting by saving $1Trillion in first year, by eliminating five cabinet departments – Commerce, HUD, Energy, Interior and Education, also abolishing Transportation Security Administration, and returning responsibility for security to private property owners. He would also abolish corporate subsidies, foreign aid and foreign wars, cut federal work force by 10% slash congressional pay and vacations,(as President, Dr Paul will take in pay $39,339 a year, approximately the median personal income of the American worker) Further, he would repeal ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and Sarbanes –Oxley, lower corporate tax to 15%, extend all Bush tax cuts, abolish the Death Tax, end taxes on personal savings, allowing families to build a nest egg. He is against WTA and NAFTA as being too managed. He will require thorough congressional review of all regulations, before implementing new ones. As to entitlements, he will honor the country’s promise to seniors and veterans while allowing young workers to opt out, and block grants to Medicaid and other welfare programs to allow the states to use their ingenuity and flexibility to solve their individual unique problems. He will conduct full audit of Federal Reserve and implement competing legislation to stabilize currency. President Paul will also cancel all onerous regulations previously issued by Executive Order.



Presidential rule by Executive Order will exist in other quarters also, pointing to distrust of the Congress. One feels Dr. Paul’s soft speech and sloppy language treatment hides some big dictatorial tendencies. Of all the candidates still in play, including Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, both smart but greedy and given to flip-flop, honest Dr. Paul would be the least desirable. It is scary to see how many leaders out there, acting out like children, can rip up the GOP, wipe out one side of our two-party system and destroy the ballgame.

Wally Dobelis and the staff of T&V wish our readers a much improved New Year.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis That our fellow citizens of Big Apple are the most feeling, helpful and cooperative, not just for the holiday season but for all-around, is best seen on the busses, M16 and M15, servicing the Bedpan Alley, First Avenue, between 14th Street and the East Eighties, where the city's main hospitals keep us moving, literally as well as mentally. A person with a walking stick will have any number of young, middle-aged as well as older women as well as men, renegadless of race, ethnic background and language, getting up to offer their seats, particularly those in the front benches parallel to traffic. The young do it without waiting for an acknowledgement, and walk away to the back of the carriage; the older will exchange smiles and words. This becomes complicated when the same local bus carries two wheelchairs and accepts more four-wheel walkers, sometimes with shopping bags and packages in the seat space. The modern pavement-level entrance buses also have an over-the wheel storage platform, where such packages can be unloaded, allowing the owner to collapse the walker. Wheelchairs, and also strollers with infants make the movements harder; everyone has to pull in their feet, to allow passage. But people cooperate, and the stronger travelers help the weak, passing the gear through, with hardy a complaint.Necessity makes good neighbors, it is evident. The many truly elderly add their own types of problems to the mix. Recently, entering the Rusk Institute for my ailments (arthritis-related), I saw a woman patient crying at the sign-in counter, “I left my wallet in the Yellow Taxi while paying, please help me!” The receptionist gave her a phone for full use, and suggested the 311 help from the Mayor's office, and the patient, between talking, phone menu waits and losing the outside line, got nowhere. Then another wheel-chaired patient's helper stepped in. "I see you still have your American Express card, did you pay with it?" The patient acknowledged, and the helper told her to call AmEx, to identify to payment's recipient and to call the taxi. That was a great solution, absolutely brilliant, and everyone around praised it. But the patient kept misdialing until the helper took over, and had AmEx locate the cabbie, who then found the wallet, sans any money (there had been several passengers.) The helper dialed the cabbie, to ask him to deliver the wallet to Rusk, but the patient took over, insisting that she could not wait, and declared that she would take the bus home, somehow getting the return fare together, and would call the cabbie from there; she did not want to have the driver lose time, and he should not be on the cell phone, legally. That evoked several rational protests regarding the strategy, until a bystander offered the solution, that the patient use her AmEx card, again, for quicker return. This broke up the conference, and everyone went about their businesses, feeling good. It still left me with the question of how she kept the AmEx card in hand and did not try to put it back in the wallet, but the helper and I agreed that advanced age can play odd tricks on behavior and memory, and let it go at that. This friendliness was also noted in Times Square area on New Year's Eve, when we arrived at 2pm for a matinee at the Roundabout, near Sixth Avenue. After 4pm we could not return, the Times Square entrance was impossible to access, with entry lines laid out south to 37th Street. But people on the street were friendly and exchanged movement strategy information freely, whether right or wrong - even the friendly cops, who arrived with uniform blue lunch boxes in preparation for a long tour, had suspected stale instructions. We decided to linger, exploring Bryant Park, not visited for years. In November and December the central lawn, west of the Library, turns into a skating ring (free), and the bushes in the surrounding square miraculously transform into 100 or so gunmetal and glass pavilions (calling them booths is too inadequate) with parquet floors, a miracle of temporary construction, with an additional two story glass and metal frame structure with a shiny dome, in the northeast corner. Arts and crafts, jewelry, leather and clothing, and food and drink must move in fantastic quantities, to pay for the up and down work of this temporary city (closing January 7), although the presence of the name of Citi seems to indicate a benevolent sponsor. But the thousands of tourists seem willing to spend (in 2007 56M foreign visitors came to the US, 35M to NYC, spending $125B and helping provide 7M jobs, mostly in the 29 states that call tourism their 1st, or 2nd or 3rd industry (shame, America, once the industrial center of our planet). Our Union Square Holiday Market (closed December 24) was far more simplistic, with wooden booths and similar goods, though less pricey. It was the 18th annual event, and it was good to see returning vendors. How much this takes away from the city's sales tax receipts remains a mystery, but it builds our image as the world's refuge for the wealthy (as contrasted with the super-wealthy, who buy coop mansions.) More of our fellow citizens’ kindness later. Meanwhile, T&V and Wally wish you a healthy and forward looking 2012, and more jobs.